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| sally | Posted
on 05-Feb-03 12:17 PM
Here's a touching, beautifully written piece on Kalpana Chawla from the San Francisco Examiner. Maybe it will resonate with some readers here, too ... ## Shooting for the moon BY ANGELINA MALHOTRA-SINGH Of The Examiner Staff Dejected but determined, 17-year-old Manjit Kaur left her Sunset district home Sunday morning in search of an American flag. The teenager felt bad about refusing to attend gurudwara with her parents. They don't really stay that long, she admits, and she sort of enjoys the melodious chanting -- even though she doesn't understand it all. But on this chilly morning she craved silence, and a wee Stars and Stripes on a flagpole. "I want to fly it at half-mast," she says, her voice knotted with emotion. She walked slowly, pausing often to rock back on her heels and stare into the bright azure sky. "I want to honor Kalpana in the American way. The way of heroes. I don't want to sit in the temple and listen to the crying or the 'see what can happen when you become overly independent?' lectures." Manjit can give you the life history of Dr. Kalpana "K.C." Chawla, one of the seven astronauts killed in the space shuttle Columbia explosion, in a nutshell or at length, as you prefer. She can detail Chawla's tomboyish ways while growing up in the drab Indian town of Karnal. At a time and in a place where girls received an early education in homemaking, Chawla's penchant for wrinkled clothing is the stuff of legends. "I read K.C. learned karate and cut her own hair," says Manjit with envy and pride, tugging on her own long plaits. The Sikh religion forbids cutting one's hair, so Chawla's daring -- she trimmed it at home, by herself, in the 60s! -- seems extraordinary. We stop to collect Vimi Kaur, 17, a wannabe pilot and Chawla fan down from Yuba City to visit her more lenient city-dwelling aunt. A rebel in her own right, Vimi is doggedly counting the days until she hits 18, Super Cuts, and San Francisco State -- in that order. "Do you know how brave K.C. was? How many people and traditions she stood up to?" she says, her tone accusatory. Chawla indeed defied a slew of traditional gender barriers on her way to becoming India's first spacewoman. She left home to attend a college 100 miles away, then left the country -- alone -- to study aeronautical engineering in the United States. "She didn't want to just get married and stay in India, she wanted to become someone. And when she did get married, it wasn't arranged. And he wasn't Indian," says Vimi. "She didn't have kids because space travel was her commitment, her life. I mean, so far." The girls look aggrieved. There aren't many space-traveling ethnic glamazons for them to wave in their parents' faces, not a lot of relentless, vegetarian, child-free Punjabi flygirls mentoring them simply by existing. There was just K.C. They couldn't afford this loss. "My mother says becoming an accountant is rebellion enough. Waiting until you're 22 to marry is independence enough," says Manjit. "She says don't shoot for the moon, be content with controlling the light switch." Chawla, the girls know, was shooting for Mars. Over hot chocolate, the girls discuss their elders' reaction to the Columbia disaster. Across The City and Bay Area, where the vivacious astronaut lived and worked for six years, the older South Asian community has for the most part been loudly brokenhearted and vociferously in-group about the tragedy. Chawla is one of theirs -- an Indian. An Indo-American, if they're feeling generous. Her triumphant takeoff was their communal victory, her demise, a personal affront. Her accidental death is being added to a litany of insults the community feels it has borne in the past few years. From post-9/11 hate crimes to the new immigrant registration program, the assault upon their lives and reputations, imagined or otherwise, has been, they feel, vigorous. "My dad, it's like he thinks the Indian astronaut was killed to spite Indians," says Manjit. "I asked him who exactly killed her. And why they didn't, you know, kill her off the first time she flew, back in 1997." Her father, typically, ordered her not to question her elders. Vimi believes the community will make an icon and martyr of Chawla, and rightly so. The example they decide to make of her, however, won't be the one she and her friends have chosen. "They'll talk about K.C. as a successful Indian immigrant. She'll be an example to the West of what 'we Indians' can do," she says. "But they're not going to make her an example to the East -- to Indian girls. They don't want her to be a role model for us. Conquer outer space? We're not allowed to go to (Fisherman's) Wharf alone." I share a quote with the pair. When Kalpana was preparing for her first shuttle mission, her mother spoke to the Indian magazine The Week. "I was probably expecting a boy as my last child," Sanyogita Chawla says. "But out came Kalpana, and she has achieved more than a boy could." They smile sadly. A sentiment they share, but one perhaps limited to Chawla's mother and their little Sunset posse of Punjabi dreamers. "Maybe it won't be me putting on a captain's uniform. Maybe I end up an accountant, too," says Vimi, fiddling with patriotic tchotchkes as Manjit selects a flag. "But my daughter, she's gonna grab the moon with both hands." E-mail: asingh@examiner.com Singh City appears every Tuesday in The Examiner. |